Chapter 11. The measurement of oral fluency in mission languages

This chapter reports a study of the L2 oral fluency of missionaries who were learning Japanese in Japan and of returnees from the same population back in the United States. Hesitation phenomena in their oral narratives were measured, and related to measures of their second language proficiency. Drawing upon this work and upon previous applications of ASR technology to oral testing, we subsequently developed a computerized instrument for the measurement of temporality in speech including an algorithm for applications in language assessment. We compare its automated measurement of our Japanese data with the manual measurement done in the original study. In conclusion, we suggest potential research and language testing applications.